Bob Aylott worked as a press photographer for the Daily Sketch, Daily Mail, National Enquirer and Daily Star in a Fleet Street career which lasted almost 40 years.

Among the scores of accolades received, he was British News Photographer of the Year in 1968 and won the Colour Picture Story of the Year in 1971 for his images from the Cholera Camps in war-torn India. He also collected a World Press Award for his 1976 prison pictures of killer Charles Manson.

He has travelled the world on news and feature assignments including the Troubles in Northern Ireland (1969-71) and chasing the fugitive Great Train Robber, Ronnie Biggs, around Brazil (1974). He has worked in the Middle East, India, Africa and the USA.

In the 1970s he roamed the world shooting paparazzi pictures of the stars for the notorious National Enquirer. At the newspapers office in Lantana, Florida, a large sign hung above the photo desk as a grim reminder to all photographers: ‘Get the Photo or Get Fired’.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and was the features editor on a UK national photographic magazine for seven years.

Since 2009, Bob has been shooting landscapes in Hampshire and writing books. He supplies greeting cards, books, photographic prints and posters to 20 different art galleries and retailers between Brighton and Bournemouth. In 2011 he turned his camera to the Solent and began photographing marine subjects. His first major event was ‘Round the Island’, the annual one-day yacht race around the Isle of Wight, where he faced a force 8 gale and 20ft waves off the Needles.

Photographs from his Fleet Street career are available as limited edition fine art prints via the website. His book, Six Days That Rocked the World and the retro images from the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival can be bought from www.isleofwightfestival1970.com.

Books by Bob Aylott

Isle of Wight Festival 1970: Six Days That Rocked The World

My Back Yard

Shoot It. Frame It. Sell It.

James Gray (London 1939)

James’s career started in Fleet Street in the 1960’s as a dispatch rider for Keystone Press. It was his job to collect films from photographers around the country and rush them back to London. This was in the days before laptops and mobile phones and it was always a race against time. ‘The first pictures back would be the ones that published the next morning. So you could have six or seven bikers racing against each other to get back to Fleet

Street first. Driving at 100mph was common. Sabotaging other bikes was acceptable. A few were killed in the rush’.

He became a photographer at the agency in 1962 and covered news and feature stories including the troubles in Aden and the Congo and on a softer note, the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour in the West Country. ‘Lennon was always bumming cigarettes off me,’

He is one of the only photographers in the world to have sat on Nelsons head while it was being cleaned in the 1960’s. (See picture)

James joined the Daily Mail in 1969 as their Royal photographer, a position he held for more than 20 years, and covered every major tour including Australia, New Zealand, America, Canada, India. and Europe. He moved to Scotland in the 1990’s to freelance and returned to England in 2000.

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